Deal Watch: another cash infusion for MyStrands

CORVALLIS-BASED MyStrands, a developer of social recommendation technology, scooped up another $24 million in early December, bringing its VC war chest to $55 million to date. Spanish bank BBVA led the series B2 funding along with existing investor Debaeque.

The company says it “develops technologies to better understand people’s taste and help them discover new things they like and didn’t know about already.”

Or, put another way by Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria, MyStrands VP of communications:

“You need to understand what people like and give them tools to control their data. The future is that everything is going to be personalized. It’s the new age of the Internet.”

MyStrands has developed a social recommender engine, which provides real-time personalized recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones, and other Internet-connected devices. It takes into account that taste is context sensitive and evolves over time. It also has developed a scalable Personalized Discovery Platform. The company says these two developments have created sales of $12 million during 2007.

“Now we are going to see a shift. Personalization will come with us wherever we go, online and offline,” predicts Aldamiz-echevarria. “The search industry has been here for 30 years, but only Google made us realize that search was relevant. We think the search industry will shift a bit toward helping you not only find things but to guiding you to things you like. People will realize more and more that they can be personal. We are entering the age of the guide.”

Since it was founded in 2003, the company has grown to 97 employees (35 in Corvallis). It also has offices in New York and Barcelona, Spain.

The tech press has reported that the new capital would be used to move beyond the current recommendation service, which is centered on music recommendations, and expand into video, online shopping and other media. So what are the next big ideas?

Aldamiz-echevarria isn’t giving it up.

“We’ve got huge plans,” he says, “but I’m not going to give you specifics.”

ROBIN DOUSSARD

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